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the front cover of a book with a picture of a man in a cowboy hatan old black and white photo of two women in fancy clothinga black and white photo of a woman holding a baby
ALDE

53 - [BRETON (André)]. Mexico. Preface by André Breton.
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Estimate €800 - €1,000
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Description
[BRETON (André)]. Mexico. Preface by André Breton. Paris, Renou & Colle, 1939. In-8, loose-leaf, illustrated cover. Exhibition catalogue devoted to Mexican art: 18th- and 19th-century Mexican paintings, folk art, Frida Kahlo, pre-Columbian art, and photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Preface by André Breton and five photographs by Raoul Ubac and others. A superb essay by Breton on Frida Kahlo: “The art of Frida Kahlo de Rivera is a ribbon wrapped around a bomb”. He attempts to liken her work to Surrealism, a view that did not sit well with Frida Kahlo, who made some very harsh remarks against Breton and his friends. In a letter to Nickolas Muray, she even said: “I’d rather sit on the ground in the Toluca market selling tortillas than have anything to do with those artistic arseholes in Paris.” Elsewhere she said: “They took me for a Surrealist. That’s not fair. I’ve never painted dreams. What I depicted was my reality”. Yet Breton had put his finest pen to paper to introduce Frida Kahlo in that catalogue: “I had not heard the timeless songs of the Zapotec musicians; my eyes remained closed to the extreme nobility, to the extreme distress of the indigenous people as they stand motionless in the sun in the markets, I could not have imagined that the world of fruit could encompass such a marvel as the pitahaya, whose flesh has the colour and curl of rose petals, the pitahaya with its grey flesh and taste of a kiss of love and desire, I had never held in my hand a lump of that red earth from which emerged, perfectly adorned, the Colima figurines that resemble both a woman and a cicada; it had not, at last, appeared to me, just like them in her bearing and adorned, too, like a princess of legend, with enchantments at her fingertips, in the streak of light cast by the quetzal as it flies away, leaving opals on the sides of the stones: Frida Kahlo de Rivera”. One of the first 20 copies printed on Montval laid paper. This exhibition took place in Paris, barely six months after André Breton’s return from Mexico.
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About the sale Eros & Thanatos – Selected extracts from the L-D S library
Auction location
Auction time 10/07/2026 at 2:00 PM
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ALDE
See original version (French)
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